Northwest Iowa — This is Severe Weather Awareness Week in Iowa. Each day this week, the National Weather Service is focusing on a different severe weather topic.
Friday’s topic is something that is all too familiar to many of us in northwest Iowa — flooding.
We talked with Warning Coordination Meteorologist Peter Rogers from the Sioux Falls office, and he tells us the advice that they give people who approach flooded roads.
As we wrap up Severe Weather Awareness Week, Rogers reminds us to listen to — or read — the entire warning when weather warnings are issued. The weather service has a few types of watches and warnings that they issue, and they have to cover all the kinds of weather that we get in the Upper Midwest. For instance, he says, we haven’t had too many large tornadoes recently, but what we have had are derechos — which are long lines of intense, fast-moving, damaging thunderstorms that often move across a great distance.
In terms of dollars, derechos can do much more damage than many tornadoes. Yet, since derechos are technically “severe thunderstorms,” the weather service doesn’t have a product called a “derecho warning.” That’s one of the reasons he encourages you to make sure you know the contents of the warning and not just that a warning has been issued. Your response could look different, depending on the circumstances.
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